Abstract
In this chapter, we discuss the challenges SMEs are facing when working with sustainability. Two main issues are addressed. Firstly, making proper sustainability decisions requires expertise rarely possessed by SMEs. As presented in the chapter, there are many assessment tools available, but these are difficult to use for non-experts and often based on inconsequent value choices. Therefore, it is recommended that companies instead partly focus on knowing the physical flows of material and energy related to company activities, and partly seek understanding of how these interact with the surrounding systems. Secondly, sustainability is often assessed in the design phase only, often based on incomplete and overall global sustainability evaluations. This is partly because companies often lack information on important indirect impact elements, as well as specific details about the actual production which mostly is based on manual data-collection. To overcome these two challenges, the chapter presents a vision for a double digital shadow which integrates the production and the sustainability dimensions into one. One element of the digital shadow focuses on the production, applying concepts from Industry 4.0/Smart production, to obtain data about the actual state of the production. A second element focuses on sustainability aspects of the production using novel semi-automated, but often highly aggregated, environmental sustainability data models (e.g., EXIOBASE). In the chapter, the background and state-of-art is expounded, the double digital shadow presented, and important work on, and practical steps to, the integration of production and sustainability is outlined.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Climate ready SME’ assisting SME companies creating organizational carbon footprints, and to understand the climate impacts of company decisions: https://www.danskindustri.dk/klimaklarSMV/, with participation from DI, Axcelfuture, Global Compact Network Denmark, Aalborg University and Viegand Maagøe. This project was concluded in 2022 and has been extended with ‘Climate Ready production company’, running until 2026, and including all 12.500 Danish production industries.
- 2.
Example presented by the Danfoss-CEO at the closing conference of the ‘Climate ready SME’ project (https://www.danskindustri.dk/klimaklarSMV/).
- 3.
The absolute dominance on global aluminum production resides with China both in terms of absolute increase in production capacity and in relative proportion of total production capacity, which mean that increased demand for aluminum is answered by production increase in China (https://international-aluminium.org/statistics/primary-aluminium-production/).
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Løkke, S., Madsen, O. (2023). SMEs and the Sustainability Challenge: Digital Shadow Enabling Smart Decision Making. In: Madsen, O., Berger, U., Møller, C., Heidemann Lassen, A., Vejrum Waehrens, B., Schou, C. (eds) The Future of Smart Production for SMEs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15428-7_23
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